For your first 120 days, don't even bother trying to optimize your listings for search results. You are behind eBays White Wall (I don't know why its called that) - it's where your listings on eBay are randomly viewable to people in specific areas, and aren't really in the core search results. You make a couple sales based on being the lowest price, but after a couple sales you don't sell anything, and your items which should be getting like 10-20 views per day are now getting 1 view every couple days. Doesn't really matter what format you sell your items under either, they just don't get much traffic.
"eBayMafia, how do you know this?"
I've played with this a lot as I make new eBay user IDs for each niche I go into. When I want to start selling Wall Murals, I open up a new account. With this, I observe how eBay determines new sellers. It's all automated of course, there isn't a person sitting behind a computer looking through items and account history trying to determine if someone is going start listing 1000 bootleg dvds or not, it's all automated by an algorithm that looks at a lot of different variables. I've noticed that when I list an item using a VPN in New York, and then go to view my item and my competitors items from my actual geographical location, my listing simply doesn't show up. After 90-120 days, things start to change. My 30 day fixed price items go from having 1 view a day, to having 20 views a day, or go from 1 purchase a week to 1 purchase a day of a specific item.
